Who doesn’t expect quicker, more responsive customer service across all channels and devices? Expectations for customer service have definitely changed and will continue changing.
To meet these expectations, it’s critical to track customer service metrics in order to learn how to identify pain points, provide assistance where it’s needed, and keep support teams productive. An effective helpdesk software will help you achieve this while also allowing you to easily manage all customer queries.
However, with so much data to consider, it can be difficult to zero in on the help desk or service desk metrics that are truly important to your organization. In this article, we’ll help you decide which helpdesk metrics to track based on your needs so that you can provide excellent customer service all year long.
11 Help Desk Metrics to Measure Your Support Team’s Performance
Here are eleven of the most critical customer service metrics and help desk KPIs your business should focus on. Let’s get started:
Number of Active Support Tickets
The number of support tickets for customer service requests, complaints, questions, issues, and so on is the first thing to keep track of. It’s important for your team to know how many support tickets are active at any given time. Why?
- This metric will notify you if the team requires additional assistance in resolving ticket requests, which can help with decisions such as hiring.
- Number of daily, weekly, and monthly active tickets indicate can indicate key customer service trends in a given time period.
Response Time
32.3% of consumers believe that customer service departments should be answering immediately—with no hold time.
- How long do customers have to wait for a first, second, third, etc response?
- How long does it take for your team to respond to each customer?
Answers to these questions are critical for providing effective customer service.
In other words, the more quickly customer queries are being addressed, the better. Here’s another fact: A study of more than 500,000 interactions found that customers are willing to spend more with a business that responds quickly to their inquiry.
Resolution Time
The resolution time is the average amount of time it takes your CSRs to resolve a ticket/case after it has been opened.
Let’s face it, everyone has a busy schedule, so it’s critical to make the customer experience as quick and asynchronous as possible. Fast resolutions to customer queries can equal satisfied customers and can also affect your overall CSAT score.
Note: If your resolution times are increasing, it may be time to make some changes, such as more streamlined tools for your customer service team or improved ticketing workflows.
Customer Churn Rate
Customer churn informs you of the number of customers who no longer use your product or service. The metric can help you determine whether you’re retaining enough customers to keep your business growing.
You can also gain insights into what causes churn. For example, are your customers only churning for one product? Which customers are most likely to churn? Is there a particular pattern? Etc.
Image source – Clevertap.com
Backlog Volume
Backlog is an important metric that a customer support team should keep track of on a regular basis. If your CSRs are accumulating more tickets than they can complete in a given time frame, they are creating a backlog.
Here are some of the key factors that contribute to high backlog volume:
- Growing business size
- Understaffing
- Agent availability/performance
- Ticket inflow
- Lack of resources, and
- Inefficient workload distribution
Measuring this metric will not tell you what’s wrong, but it will indicate a problem.
Ticket Trends
Tracking this metric provides several key pieces of information about your customer service, including a snapshot of tickets received, tickets resolved, and tickets unresolved in comparison to different timeframes. We recommend looking for a helpdesk that allows you to easily switch between timeframes – daily, weekly, and monthly views.
Here are some insights/ trends you might miss if you don’t keep track of ticketing trends:
- Issues with your product/ service
- Support team performance
- Insights on your customer satisfaction
- Consistent communication gaps or issues
Image source – CX Preferences Survey 2019
Customer Satisfaction Rating/ CSAT Score
When a ticket is resolved, a customer is usually given the opportunity to express their satisfaction with the outcome. CSAT survey is an excellent tool for measuring customer satisfaction at different touchpoints. These ratings can also be the most direct and honest method of gathering organized consumer feedback.
CSAT links can be sent to your customers right after a resolution is completed, or via social media, emails, or any other touchpoint to gain insights. When combined with other help desk reporting metrics, the reasons for low customer satisfaction can be easy to determine.
Image source – Qualtrics
Overall Ticket Volume
This help desk metric represents the total number of tickets or customer interactions handled by your support team during a given time period. Monitoring ticket volume over time allows you to identify specific volume trends.
For example, you might notice that call volume always spikes immediately after a specific holiday or on weekends. Understanding these trends will assist you in identifying potential solutions to tackle the increased workload. During these volume peaks, you could assign more agents to handle the increased demand.
How can measuring this metric help:
- Identify sharp fluctuations in ticket volumes over a period of time to optimize your team’s workflow
- Check for any additional resource requirements to help out your team
- Provide training sessions for agents to improve their workflows
- Improve your overall staffing model
Support Agent Performance
A key step is to make sure your help desk platform allows you to select metrics that focus on specific agent performance. This allows you to track individual agent performance with specific metrics such as ticket volume, lowest/highest average handle time, average CSAT, first contact resolutions, and so on.
Tracking these metrics lets you figure out how your individual agents are performing the tasks expected of them. In some cases, you might find that your support agents are performing well, and deserve things like promotions and raises. In others, you might learn that your agents need additional training to perform better on the job.
Transfer Rate
Transfer rates are another service desk KPI to consider when determining the success of a customer interaction. This percentage reflects the number of calls an agent transfers to someone else, such as a supervisor who is available or a different department entirely.
Tracking transfer rate makes it easier to identify recurring issues that result in suboptimal usage of your resources and, could allow you to find more effective solutions to streamline your workflow.
Tickets by Channel
Keep track of the number of tickets filed in each channel to get a sense of how frequently customers use them. Being able to see where your support tickets are being generated from allows you to streamline different channels to better assist your customers. Here are some examples:
- If the majority of your tickets are coming through your live widget, perhaps there is an opportunity to improve your customer experience by introducing a self-service portal or conversational bots to improve productivity.
- Another example: If you discover that a particular channel is underserved or understaffed, you can assign more agents to monitor those types of tickets in order to maximize help desk efficiency.
Choose the Right Helpdesk with Real-time Reporting
An effective help desk and customer service solution includes key metric monitoring while also allowing you to provide streamlined support. There are a variety of tools available on the market to help with and support these processes.
For example, a tool like Helplama Helpdesk has a wide range of analytics and reporting tools that offer the in-depth information needed to make business-critical decisions about your customer service quality.
The platform’s flexible reports show you how your team is handling the overall customer experience and monitoring each agent’s ongoing performance. In addition to the various reporting features, here are some reasons why support teams prefer the platform
- You can include a live chat widget on your website to allow visitors to raise concerns in real-time.
- The platform integrates email support as well as AI-drafted emails. This can significantly reduce your email traffic as well as your workload.
- With a single click, you can integrate with e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Magneto, and Woo-commerce, among others.
- The helpdesk improves response time and productivity by providing AI-suggested responses based on previous tickets handled.
- It also includes an automated training module for your team members to be trained and tested.
Conclusion
As you can see, measuring the right helpdesk metrics provides invaluable insights into customer service success, agent effectiveness, and overall team productivity. With the right metrics, you can identify the root causes of the majority of your customer service issues. This will assist you in hiring new agents, planning a suitable staffing pattern, training your agents more effectively, and speeding up the entire process.
To effectively monitor helpdesk performance metrics, you must ensure that you are not taking on too much by selecting too many. It’s also critical to not overlook key metrics that could help you improve your customer service. Striking the right balance is possible, and we hope this guide has assisted you in narrowing the scope of service desk reporting metrics you require for your day-to-day operations.
